Dear Rabbi - Why Me?

By Guy D. Garcia

Helping victims of personal tragedies regain their faith in God

In addition to his full-time duties as rabbi in a suburban New England town, Harold Kushner has become rabbi to a nationwide congregation. It all began in 1966 when Kushner's son Aaron was found to have progeria, a rare disease that drastically accelerates the aging process. Aaron died in 1977 at the age of 14, with the body of a small old man. The depression and grief threw Kushner into a shock of theological doubt: How could God be a force for good if such an unwarranted horror could be visited on one of his own ministers? For a year Kushner wrestled with the question in writing. The result, published in 1981, was When Bad Things Happen to Good People (Schocken Books; $10.95). It is an odd book--part classical theology, part cracker-barrel, self-help philosophy. But when an excerpt appeared in Redbook in the October 1981 issue, it made the author a national figure. Kushner, 47, the rabbi of Temple Israel in Natick, Mass., remembers the turning point well: "It was Rosh Hashana. We had just come home from services and were very tired. Suddenly the phone started ringing off the wall. All afternoon long. And from non-Jews, not realizing it was a Jewish high holy day. These were phone calls from people with problems."

Since then the book has climbed the national bestseller charts (23 consecutive weeks on the New York Times list, ranked sixth last week), while Kushner has received a growing volume of mail and phone calls. The letter writers and callers--whether Jew, Catholic or Protestant--are people who have suffered some personal tragedy and found themselves questioning basic, long-held beliefs about the goodness or even the existence of God.

"I lost my son to cancer two years ago," wrote a Chicago woman. "He was only 3 1/2 when he died. I hated and blamed God. But your book was the real turnaround in my mourning. You let me love the Lord again." Said a mother from Nevada: "I gave birth to a Down's-syndrome baby and have been hunting [for God] ever since. You were the person to express to me that I have a right to feel anger. Maybe now I can believe in a more realistic God." Wrote a reader in Pennsylvania: "I wish I had had your book 20 years ago. I offer you my agreement and thanks."

Kushner had coped with his own doubts about God's goodness through months of soul searching and Bible reading. He found particular comfort in the Book of Job. In Kushner's view, Job, who underwent unspeakable suffering, was faced with competing and mutually exclusive perceptions of God--one who is all powerful but not totally good, and one who is good but not completely powerful. Kushner decided that this biblical story best advises us to accept a God who is good but less than omnipotent. Bad things thus happen in situations not within God's direct control. This conclusion became the central thesis of his book.

It is a thesis that is at odds with traditional theological concepts of God's nature. Most theologians explain God as a kind of Supreme Governor of the universe, whose control extends to all things, including evil. Says Donald Bloesch, professor of theology at the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary in Iowa: "I believe the biblical God is a God who is all good and all powerful. He imposes a self-limitation on himself, through his love. In and of himself, he is in control. The ultimate explanation of evil is a mystery. God does not cause evil. He takes a risk by giving human beings the gift of freedom. This freedom is the source of moral evil. But from my point of view, the Bible doesn't provide a full explanation of evil." Like many such theological views, Bloesch's understanding of evil requires, in the final analysis, almost unquestioning trust. But, he says, "we can only trust a God who is omnipotent as well as all loving. A God who isn't quite in control would be a God who is unworthy of worship. Rabbi Kushner's answer is unsatisfactory."

Rabbi Neil Gillman, a philosophy professor at Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York City, says flatly, "Kushner misunderstands Job. He is willing to do away with God's omnipotence, and this is a radical break with the Jewish past. All the traditional answers say that God is in some way responsible for suffering; Kushner says, 'Maybe he's not.' His position is very problematic as a solution to the problem of evil, and a lot of my students find it very difficult to take. I personally would have trouble gaining comfort and consolation from knowing that randomness was a part of the world."

But comfort and consolation are precisely what a huge and diverse audience has gained from Kushner's message. Funeral homes have ordered copies of the book for mourners. The Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis Society of America has distributed an article about Kushner to its 55,000 members. Insists Kushner: "I think the book addresses a question everybody's concerned with. Many times when I'm on a speaking tour and I take a taxi, the driver will see the book and say, 'You've written the story of my life.' And a lot of people give it to a friend who's suffered a tragedy."

And over the past few months, Kushner has been in demand as a speaker at conventions and forums throughout the East. Physicians seem to find his message relevant. "A doctor may be coming to one tragic situation from something far worse," explains Kushner, "and just by comparison would not take somebody's grief and fear seriously enough." Kushner's counsel amounts to a kind of sensitivity training. He advises survivors not to indulge in grief-inspired faultfinding. Says Kushner: "People are so desperate to make sense of the world that they make sense of it by blaming themselves." He has taken calls from people who told him his book rescued them from suicide.

Kushner says that the torrent of religious and personal response to his book is often more than he can bear, emotionally and physically. "I tell some of them to turn to their own clergymen; that's where they belong," he says. "My family's been through a lot with Aaron's sickness and death. This has just brought more heavy conversation into the family." Still, while Kushner may look forward to leaving the spotlight and resuming his full schedule as a rabbi and Sunday-school administrator, he admits that helping others who have suffered has had its consolations. "I feel gratified," says Kushner. "I have personally gone beyond an act of theology by taking an abstract idea and making it so real and helpful that people's lives are changed by it." --By Guy D. Garcia. Reported by Douglas Starr/Boston

With reporting by Douglas Starr

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